Chennai :

Time was when tea was the drink of the working class in the state and coffee was considered a sophisticated brew for the uppermiddle class and the elite. The introduction of coffee into Tamil Nadu caused a certain cultural anxiety initially but the beverage was ultimately appropriated by Tamil society.

These and other fascinating insights about the history of plantations, coffee and tea were revealed at a seminar titled ‘Tea For David’, a felicitation of historian and professor David Washbrook, who retired from Trinity College, Cambridge University after teaching at the famous institution for 40 years. This wasn’t surprising, because Washbrook is an academic who specialises in the history of south India.

“The appropriation of coffee was mediated both by caste and class and coffee became the marker of the brahmin middle-class,” said A R Venkatachalapathy, professor, Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, speaking at the seminar organised by the department of humanities and social sciences of IIT-Madras

Quoting a court case from Kolar Gold Fields in which a Buddhist dalit was refused coffee, Venkatachalapathy explored the question of coffee and caste in colonial TN. “On July 13, 1927, Ramaswamy and two friends, one a brahmin, walked into a restaurant. He ordered three coffees. When the proprietor saw Ramaswamy, he told the waiter not to give coffee to a lower caste. Upset over the incident, he walked out. His brahmin friend, however, didn’t accept the coffee served to him as a mark of protest,” said Venkatachalapathy, the author of ‘In Those Days There Was No Coffee: Writings in Cultural History’.

“Ramaswamy filed a case and hired barrister E L Iyer, a renowned labour activist in Madras,” he said. “But today, there is no record of the proceedings, barring three reports in a Tamil newspaper. It shows that drinking coffee was no ordinary matter those days. With a separate place for Brahmins, caste was very much part of the ‘coffee hotels’ of those days, and leaders like Periyar E V Ramasamy had to fight against this.”

Speaking on ‘Planters, Power and the Colonial Law’, Ravi Raman, of Council for Social Development, New Delhi, said the British subjected dalits in plantations to various forms of institutional and coercive repression.

“The contrasting dimensions of colonial law have been explored by historians, but it appears that plantation owners too developed their own laws. They ultimately minimised abuse of workers but, by and large, they wielded coercive power,” he said.

source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> City> Chennai / TNN / December 09th, 2014

A total of ancient 30 pottery pieces dating back to 3 century BC have been unearthed at Madhagam village on the Pudukottai-Avudaiyarkovil road near Embal, a coastal village, recently.

A salient feature of these pieces is that eight of them contained strokes testifying to the ancient practice of denoting figures.

While one of the pottery pieces had the strokes of wings of a bird, another contained Swasthik symbol.

Interestingly, one piece contained a couple of alphabet-like markings, said S.Neelavathy, Assistant Professor in History, Government Arts College for Women, here on Thursday.

Chance discovery

She said the digging of an irrigation tank in the village for maintenance led to the chance discovery of these pieces.

She, along with Karu.Rajendran, an epigraphist, went to the spot to study the pieces following a tip-off from the students hailing from the nearby villages about the finding.

The pieces testify to the fact that the coastal district accounted for human habitation in the hoary past.

She has planned to take up further research in the area with the cooperation of the local villagers.

She has appealed to the villagers to immediately contact her if they come across any piece of pot with strokes, by dialling 9788205562.

source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> Cities> Tiruchirapalli / by Special Correspondent / Pudukottai – December 12th, 2014

They look nothing like Harrison Ford. One is a professional archaeologist who is more than 70 years old and the other a shippie-cum-blogger who is more comfortable doing painstaking background work than with the limelight.But, in terms of real life impact their work is as thrilling as and probably more productive than Indiana Jones ever was in the movies. Through their websites, plunderedpast.in and poetryinstone.in, they have tried to create a record of artefact thefts and done their bit in tracking them down in museums and private collections across the world. Kirit Mankodi and Vijaykumar Sundaresan have also come up with crucia information that has helped to beef up the case against art thief Subhash Kapoor lodged in jail and undergoing trial.

Mankodi’s passion for retrieving stolen treasures started in the late 1990s when he accompanied a team of archaeologists who went on an excavation in Rajasthan. The team found three ancient sculptures dating back to 9th century .

The site was cleared and the sculptures were displayed with a signboard. But a couple of years later they disappeared from the site. “The big sculpture among the three was the first to be stolen. A year later another one went missing and soon after the last one too vanished. I wrote to the concerned authorities but that was of no use. Then I decided to do some thing of my own to prevent illicit smug gling of antiques from our country and that’s why it all began,” said Mankodi, who is a senior archaeologist. Vijay who grew up in awe of the thousands of grand temples across Tamil Nadu was also concerned about antique idols being stolen from unguarded tem ples. By reading books, visiting temples and connecting with a larger group of heritage enthusiasts over the internet, he started to piece together information.He started feeding this information from the background to investigative agencies for two years but he found that did not help. “It was then I decided to come out and go to the press. I had to open up because there was no point being a silent informer,” he says.

By working through a network of heritage enthusiasts including among the global Indian diaspora, Vijay has been able to unearth crucial information in the Subhash Kapoor case. One such was a print catalogue belonging to Subhash Kapoor’s Art of the Past gallery in New York that helped him to connect the statue of Uma in Singapore’s Asian Civilizations Museum he had seen many years back with the one in grainy photographs published by the Tamil Nadu police’s Idol Wing as having been stolen from Ariyalur.

Poetryinstone.in documents missing artefacts and explains to the otherwise flitting online reader the value of Indian heritage. Reach Foundation’s citation lauds Vijay for his efforts not just in educating people about missing temple icons but also for explaining to the layman in simple terms the complex craft of iconography and temple art.

The recent return of a Nataraja idol from Australia is only the beginning and many , many more stolen statues are in museums across the world including in Australia, say Kirit and Vijay . Among the work of Mankodi is the sourcing of the sandstone Bharhut Yakshi – at $15 million the most expensive item in Kapoor’s loot catalogue – still with US authorities. Mankodi was able to trace it to a shrine in Madhya Pradesh (South Pole, April 29) following which Indian officials in the US got in touch with him asking for supporting evidence. Mankodi says indications from US and Indian officials are that the Yakshi would return, sooner or later.

Email us your with full name and address to southpole.toi@timesgroup.com

source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> City> Chennai / by Debayan Tewari & M T Saju, TNN / December 08th, 2014